8/5/2023 0 Comments Gopro karmaLike many companies that come from a startup background, there’s still a certain energy at DJI to forge ahead it’s part of the company culture and could even be thought of as an expectation. (Well, actually it’s not that hard to imagine: Just look at their products.) Having worked in startups that have built incredible things (including UAVs!) with a very small engineering and fabrication team, it’s hard to imagine the kind of progress a company could achieve with that many focussed brains. More than 3,000 employees – perhaps even more than 4,000 – are engineers. It currently has about 14,000 employees and the firm tells DroneDJ that roughly one-quarter are either engineers or working in R&D. But that’s not all: DJI is by far the biggest player on the planet. Moore’s law certainly explains a significant part of the equation when it comes to the technological advances we’ve witnessed in drones in the past eight years. They enable your drone to do virtually everything that it does. Those ubiquitous Integrated Circuits are in every single drone on the planet, from the most sophisticated industrial drone all the way down to the cheapest toy micro-copter. There seems to be some consensus, however, that computing power will not continue to grow at historical rates.īut wow, did Moore’s Law ever power the world through a lot of technology.Īlmost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moore’s prediction. In fact, the MIT story quotes some smart people as saying Moore’s Law is essentially toast – though proponents argue it’s still on track. The sizes of transistors in these chipsets are now so unbelievably small that further shrinking at historical rates is becoming more difficult. Some believe Moore’s law has started sliding in recent years. Today, nearly 50 billion transistors can be squeezed onto the most sophisticated chips. “Since then, his prediction has defined the trajectory of technology and, in many ways, of progress itself,” states an excellent article published in the MIT Review earlier this year. A decade later, when that proved accurate, Moore amended his prediction: The number of transistors on an IC chip would double every two years. He suggested then that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would reach 65,000 by 1975. Odds are you’ve heard of the prediction made by Gordon Moore back in 1965. Geeks and non-geeks alike often talk about the progression of technology in terms of Moore’s Law. (I purchased and still own one of those drones, along with a Phantom 4 Professional and an Inspire 2.) Moore’s Law The original Mavic Pro took the industry by storm following its release (just a month after GoPro’s ill-fated GoPro Karma, in October of 2016), and DJI was initially unable to meet the tremendous demand for its folding drone. And while DJI’s R&D department packed on the features, there was – at least with some models – a reduction in size and weight. Soon there would be 4k video, obstacle avoidance, object tracking, AI, and more. (And that gimbal, according to DJI, was produced at 1/10th of the cost of its Zenmuse 15 – a standalone gimbal from the same era.) The Phantom 2 Vision+ had a camera, three-axis gimbal, and streaming video. The Phantom 1 was a complete, ready-to-fly unit with no exposed wires – but it lacked a camera. With every generation, it seems, there has been something truly new. Same goes, arguably, for things like home theatre amplifiers, speakers – and more.ĭrones, however, seem to have progressed faster – particularly the many produced by DJI. But it’s not like the new phone does the basics *that* much better. A phone released a couple of years ago will still do the job just fine, even though newer phones have more features. With many forms of technology, developments feel more linear and incremental. (And that’s without even touching on enterprise/industrial drones and other DJI products – an area we’ll save for another day!) This company has made huge technological leaps in a very compressed time frame. When you look at that product line and consider the improvements in each short generation, it’s impossible to not be impressed. Most of my time was spent in a small meeting room, but that lobby display stuck with me. I had the chance to visit DJI for a week back in 2016. Usually, that has left competitors trying to catch up to DJI, rather than the other way around. In Chinese, those first two words mean “Great Frontier.” As the industry leader in the manufacture and sales of consumer and enterprise drones (as well as technological innovations in many other areas – think Osmo, Ronin, etc.), DJI has largely set the pace for the industry. The letters D-J-I stand for Dà- Jiāng Innovations.
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